Re: [gentoo-user] search patterns in less(1)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 7/19/19 11:28 AM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 7/19/19 2:40 AM, n952162 wrote:
>> The man page says:
>>
>>    The pattern is a regular expression, as recognized by
>>                the regular expression library supplied by  your system
>>
>> There are many regular expression libraries on my system.
>>
>

Actually, the ambiguity in the man page is there for a reason. When you
configure less, you can pass --with-regex=<library> to select an
implementation. You get libpcre with USE=pcre in Gentoo. Without
USE=pcre, I think you get the GNU libc implementation (from grep et al.)
that just coincidentally supports "\b" as well.

There are a few other options for that flag that aren't available in
Gentoo, though, so the man page is being vague out of necessity.